Blog Stats

Blogroll

5-4-3-2-1

As I am off to the US on Friday for a work conference I want to make the training this week count, just in case I don’t get much (or any) in for the 8 days I’m away. For today’s session I decided to try out a few things with my technique that I picked up from the course yesterday, and from watching Tim on the erg. Therefore I started the session at a low (for me) rate, and gradually increased both rate and pace through the session.

The main thing I was concentrating on was the finish of the stroke. I don’t have good hamstring flexibility, and as I discovered yesterday also not very balanced flexibility between left and right, which means I struggle “rocking forwards” at the hips after the finish. It is tough trying to change ingrained technique from many millions of metres. The main thing I was trying to do differently today though was to mimic the upper body movement pattern that Tim, and other top lightweights that I’ve seen on the erg before like Tom Kay, Eskild Ebbesen and Henrik do. In essence, I don’t think I normally (aside from sprinting) finish off the stroke very strongly. I don’t think I use my lats nearly enough. My mimicry today was an effort to begin rectifying that.

All in all a very solid session I think. The first 3 reps (so 12k) felt pretty comfortable, so I decided to push the 2k a bit harder, then the 1k a bit harder still. With a 1k warm up and 1k warm down the session today was 17k, so a good day’s work.